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Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what humanities stands for in the US (or UK, AUS, SA, ...) education context, if it has even a fixed meaning over time. Like the

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what humanities stands for in the US (or UK, AUS, SA, ...) education context, if it has even a fixed meaning over time. Like the (Humbold-esque?) categorization of Naturwisschenschaften vs Geisteswissenschaften in my country/language, it seems to be partly used for dissing the humanities, but Reine Wissenschaften (where you're getting a degree in philosophy when studying maths) seems absent? I found it telling when the interview was touching Florence and The Medici, that renaissance humanism (with its all-important aspect of rediscovering, republishing, and preserving antique text material) wasn't connected to the humanities topic. Maybe it was more of a Venice thing, but I saw it as a lost opportunity to learn more of Andreessen's opinion on preservation of our digital heritage (or lack thereof) seeing as he developed Netscape from Mosaic etc.

jfengel 4y ago
The terminology is vaguely defined. In the mouth of a techie, I'd assume they mean "everything that gets studied but isn't STEM or business", with a connotation "and is therefore easy since it doesn't have a rigorous grading system". There are links between Renaissance humanism and what is now called "humanities". The Humanists weren't just about the re-naissance of Greek and Roman works, but also about creating new ones. A lot of humanists were poets, painters, and writers -- fields often lumped in with "humanities". There was also a rebirth of what the Greeks called philosophy, which also included subjects that we'd call sociology (laws, ethics, forms of government, etc.) Sociology is also treated as adjacent to humanities. Techies do need to learn that the easily-measurable aspects of a technology are not the only important ones. We use tech because it appeals to us as humans, using the yardstick of our perceptions of things. Humanities are easily dissed because they're hard to measure objectively, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant. Indeed, they may be more important precisely because we haven't (yet) learned them well enough to be simple.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  I wouldn’t call humanities easy. I did very poorly at them. I don’t dislike humanities, but if your grading system is going to be a bit subjective, I’d prefer not to be graded at all or at least just a pass/fail.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    The teachers largely agree. They don't want to give the grades, either. They very much don't like the way they have to teach differently in order to give grades. I suspect many would be happy to do pass fail.

jfengel 4y ago

The terminology is vaguely defined. In the mouth of a techie, I'd assume they mean "everything that gets studied but isn't STEM or business", with a connotation "and is therefore easy since it doesn't have a rigorous grading system". There are links between Renaissance humanism and what is now called "humanities". The Humanists weren't just about the re-naissance of Greek and Roman works, but also about creating new ones. A lot of humanists were poets, painters, and writers -- fields often lumped in with "humanities". There was also a rebirth of what the Greeks called philosophy, which also included subjects that we'd call sociology (laws, ethics, forms of government, etc.) Sociology is also treated as adjacent to humanities. Techies do need to learn that the easily-measurable aspects of a technology are not the only important ones. We use tech because it appeals to us as humans, using the yardstick of our perceptions of things. Humanities are easily dissed because they're hard to measure objectively, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant. Indeed, they may be more important precisely because we haven't (yet) learned them well enough to be simple.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
I wouldn’t call humanities easy. I did very poorly at them. I don’t dislike humanities, but if your grading system is going to be a bit subjective, I’d prefer not to be graded at all or at least just a pass/fail.
- jfengel 4y ago
  The teachers largely agree. They don't want to give the grades, either. They very much don't like the way they have to teach differently in order to give grades. I suspect many would be happy to do pass fail.